


you epicenter you

by coricomile



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Gen, Hospitals, Pre-Slash, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-02
Updated: 2014-10-02
Packaged: 2018-02-19 15:33:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2393621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coricomile/pseuds/coricomile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reid never gets used to being in hospitals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you epicenter you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Caroline Crane (carolinecrane)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carolinecrane/gifts).



> Carolinecrane: I've been reading your stuff for years, and am a little intimidated to hand this over to you. Um. Hope you like it?

Reid never gets used to being in hospitals. The smell sinks under his skin and sticks to the soft parts of his mouth, drying him out from the inside. The beeping of machines makes his head hurt.

“Stop moving,” Morgan says. His voice is thick, low. Reid reaches for the paper cup on the bedside table and hands it to him. The IV tucked into the back of his hand drips steadily. Reid thinks, for a moment, that he can hear the liquid moving, even though he knows it’s just a tic of his brain trying to make sense of the room.

“Did you know,” Reid says, because it’s the one thing he’s always been able to say, “that fidgeting is linked to cognitive load? When the brain is overworked, it offloads some of the cognitive load to movement and frees up thought processes to the more important task at hand.”

“Is that why you’re always so-” Morgan coughs, and Reid refills his cup. 

There’s stubble growing at the side of his head, dark and patchy. Reid’s always wondered if Morgan shaves his head because of the popular aesthetic, or if it’s to offset early stage male pattern baldness. He wants to touch it, to catalog how it is the same and how it is different from what he already knows. Instead, he stuffs his hands under his crossed arms and tries to stop the jiggling of his leg.

“Yeah,” he says. “Probably.”

“One day, you’re going to combust,” Morgan says. Reid has all the statistics about spontaneous human combustion in his head, knows the triggers of the few cases and the theories on how it works, but he doubts Morgan actually wants to know any of them. “Just relax.”

There’s going to be a scar, right above Morgan’s hip, barely three inches across, but dark. The knife, small and sharp and vicious, had bisected his transverse abdominal. Reid wonders if Morgan will still do his standard workout routine when he’s healed enough. He wonders if the left side of his body will still develop the same way as his right, or if the damaged tissue will leave him just slightly lopsided. 

Morgan’s hand flops onto his knee. It’s warm and heavy, all dead weight that makes the old wound there twinge a little. He hadn’t realized he’d been moving again. 

“It’s gonna be alright,” Morgan says, sleepy slow. “Just close your eyes, and stop thinking.”

“It’s physically impossible to stop thinking,” Reid says. He stares at the bruising around the IV needle, and lets himself touch the swollen outsides of Morgan’s knuckles. One of them is larger than the others, possibly from a chip in the bone or an internal bruise. “Meditation can stave off a majority of conscious thoughts, but the subconscious continually works to-” 

Morgan’s fingers twitch. He’s asleep again. 

Reid leans forward, just a little, and touches the stubble growing above Morgan’s ear. It feels the same as the stubble Reid shaves off himself every week, if maybe a little coarser. He sits back in his chair and maps the whirls of Morgan’s fingerprints instead. He cannot stop thinking, or fidgeting, or working, but he can redirect. 

He’s always been good at that.

**Author's Note:**

> I love writing Reid. Partly because he's such an interesting character, but also because I get to learn facts. So many facts!


End file.
